@MASTERSTHESIS\{IMM2007-05397,
    author       = "T. R. Korsgaard",
    title        = "Improving Trust in the Wikipedia",
    year         = "2007",
    school       = "Informatics and Mathematical Modelling, Technical University of Denmark, {DTU}",
    address      = "Richard Petersens Plads, Building 321, {DK-}2800 Kgs. Lyngby",
    type         = "",
    note         = "Supervised by Associate Professor Christian Damsgaard Jensen, {IMM,} {DTU}.",
    url          = "http://www2.compute.dtu.dk/pubdb/pubs/5397-full.html",
    abstract     = "The Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia collaboratively edited by Internet users with a minimum of administration. Anybody can write an article for the Wikipedia and there is no verification of the author’s expertise on the particular subject. This may lead to problems relating to the quality of articles, completeness and accuracy of the information in the articles, and this could result in distrust in the Wikipedia. It is our opinion that users should be able to assess the correctness, completeness and impartiality of information in the Wikipedia, and by that improve their personal trust in the Wikipedia.

In this thesis, we propose a recommendation system, which allows Wikipedia users to calculate a personalized recommendation for a specific article based on all the feedback (recommendations) provided by other Wikipedia users. Recommendations are calculated decentralized, which means that recommendations from users that one user has found useful in the past carries more weight than recommendations from unknown users or users that the user did not agree with in the past. This prevents a large population of people with similar political, social or religious norms from determining the global recommendation of all Wikipedia articles.

There are currently thousands of wiki installations through out the web, besides the Wikipedia. The introduction of a recommendation system should therefore not require any modifications to the Wikipedia engine. The proposed recommendation system is implemented in a proxy placed between the user’s web-browser and the Wikipedia, for instance on the user’s own machine, so there is no need to modify the Wikipedia.

A recommender system is build based on recommendations from trusted users. The recommendation system continuously updates each trustees trust value based on the feedback given from the user.

The recommendation system has been evaluated and meets the functional requirements. The recommender system shows correct behavior. Experiments and benchmarking tests show that using the recommender system does not influence the Internet experience for its’ users. In our evaluation we propose an approach to long term usability testing of the recommender system."
}